LITTLE TOY CAR

After a childhood of poverty and abuse, a young man tries to find happiness as a musician in Oliver’s novel.

Gene Oliver Nelson’s early years growing up on the outskirts of Denver are marked by scarcity. His mother, Anita, proves unable to afford their modest home, and the pair end up living in a car in the parking lot of a fitness center, which Anita joins, so that they have somewhere to shower. The boy blames himself for their situation, as he was caught stealing a vintage toy car when he was 5, and Anita was compelled to pay the irate owner $100 to protect him from arrest; it’s an event that he remembers ruefully, even into adulthood. Their homelessness ends when Anita marries Jacob Nelson, a religious extremist who imposes his faith on Gene and regularly beats him. The boy finds some solace in music, teaching himself to play the guitar and becoming part of a secret band with two of his schoolmates: “Music did for me everything that Jesus never could. Music was my sanctuary.” The protagonist finally meets his biological father, George Dickson, who spent years in prison for driving under the influence, and emancipates himself from Jacob’s tyranny by moving to California to pursue a music career. However, he struggles to find either success or peace of mind, though he yearns to make the world a better place. Unfortunately, this longing is communicated in hollow platitudes that are characteristic of the novel as a whole: “Love is great, but it wasn’t the pinnacle. The pinnacle was to use that love to better the world. That is what I wanted to discover. That is what I wanted to find. That is what I wanted to achieve. The pinnacle.” Oliver’s portrait of Gene feels somewhat directionless, and it reads more like a string of loosely connected incidents than a dramatic novel. That said, the author does have a keen sense of the nuances of adolescent angst and intelligently captures Gene’s youthful purposelessness.

An earnest bildungsroman that’s hampered by a rickety plot structure.